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In part I of this series, I talked about using mind maps and spreadsheets as tools to help clarify your thinking about a niche. Here’s part II.

The List of Nouns

Now that you have some of the business/marketing stuff on paper, it’s time to consider the web site (really, its a web application, don’t kid yourself). This is where too many people get tangled up, mostly because everyone has this obsession about functionality.

Let me tell you something right now, people, and please please please listen up. A web site or piece of software isn’t about functionality, not really. It’s about the person using said web site or software to accomplish a goal or activity. Period, end of story, move on.

But you just can’t move on, can’t you? Lots of people talk to me about their ideas for such and such a site and they have these lists of functions. It always make me laugh. Why? Because there’s no better way to shut the door on your dreams than to focus on functions.

Let me give you an example. Had a young man approach me last month about a site he wanted me to build. It had to allow publishing of certain kinds of content with certain kinds of database fields on such and such mobile devices. Most users were contributors who would submit their content via a certain process to a group of editors, each of which would have certain specific tools at their disposal to mark up the content and flow it to a site manager, who would press certain buttons to get content on the site.

My comment to him was, “Why build this application? Why not go with WordPress?” WordPress is free, supports most of what he wanted (in generic ways) and helped his organization achieve its goal: publishing and managing content from a variety of contributors.

No deal. WordPress wasn’t good enough. Oh, but wait, the price tag for something custom was just too much. Another business bites the dust. Grrrr.

Here’s how to avoid this problem. Develop a list of nouns and verbs that describe who your users are (nouns) and what they want to do on the site (verbs). Very simple, very tidy, and expressed in a way that will help you make a really important decision….

Do I build? Do I buy? Or do I buy and then modify? (See, it kinda rhymes: build…buy…modify!)

The list of nouns is plain and simple a list of users. Identify as many users as you can:

• Contributors
• Editors
• Authors
• Supervisors
• Judges
• Moderators

You get the idea. Your list of nouns/users might also be segmented by level of expertise (newbie, intermediate, wizard, demigod) or type of topic (if you have a hiking site, you’ll have recreational hikers, mountain hikers, urban hikers, et cetera).

Once you have a list of nouns, you’re ready for ze verbs.

List of Verbs

If your list of nouns is all about users, then your list of verbs is all about actions and behaviors for each user. You might want want all your contributors to create content but not be able to post it, or see other contributions. Those who moderate only get to see articles or postings that violate certain rules or policies, or they may see everything that comes by.

Here are some examples:

• Create content
• Edit content
• Rate content
• Moderate content
• Comment
• Subscribe to a feed
• Subscribe to a newsletter
• Provide feedback
• Bookmark a page
• Share with a friend

See how non-specific this list is? These verbs don’t imply any details. Yes, you want users to “share with a friend” but at this point you don’t care if its got a CAPTCHA device to kill spambots, or if it posts to a database and blind copies you on the sent email, or if it uses AJAX to regex confirm valid emails. Down that path leads madness! Madness, I say!

This list of verbs is crucial because it will communicate to your web site team a list of things that you want to see come out of their work, things they will either have to build or buy in order to support your overall objective.

For example, your team might look at your nouns and verbs and say, “Listen, this looks like a community site to us, so we recommend using XYZ framework. It’s free, it’s fast, and it handles 90% of what you’re talking about, but it doesn’t do ratings. It looks like ratings are pretty important to you, so we’ll need to either find a ratings module (which might cost some money) or build it ourselves (which will take 100 man hours).”

Two light bulbs should be going off in your head right now:

• I’ve just made the job of working with my web geeks much easier!
• Gee, my business idea isn’t as unique as I thought!

The first light bulb should make both you and your team happy. So spontaneously happy that someone over there should just cough up a check or something and send it my way. (Seriously. I can’t tell you how much unrighteous crap and inefficiency goes on because business stakeholders have no friggin’ clue how to communicate with a web development team.)

The second light bulb is equally important, and should by no means cause you despair. After all, we live in a world where competition is healthy and desired. Otherwise, we’d only have one airline, one auto maker, one ice cream maker, and so on. What you need to take away from this realization, though, is that there’s no need for you to reinvent the wheel.

For example, if you want to allow your users to rate articles, there’s no need to have some kind of ultra-specific way to do it that will take your developers 1800 hours to develop and delay your offering by three months. There are 800 or so free or low-cost modules for blogs, wikis, forums and what have you that let you implement a rating system right now without hassle and allows your team to focus on something that really matters (like making sure the server won’t crash when you get a million visitors) and lets you focus on something even more important (like actually getting those million visitors).

So there you have it, four tools that will help you take some meaningful action. To summarize, these tools are:

1. The mind map, which will help you ideate and brainstorm in an intuitive way.
2. The spreadsheet, which will help you associate some hard facts or numbers to your idea.
3. The list of nouns, which identify your users.
4. The list of verbs, which identify activities and behaviors on your site.

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This morning’s New York Times story on Seattle Calvinist preacher Mark Driscoll is just another reminder that niches exist everywhere, and that even belief systems (especially belief systems) can be discussed in market terms. Check out the way (the New York Times, at least) frames the ministry this man has created:

Mark Driscoll is American evangelicalism’s bête noire. In little more than a decade, his ministry has grown from a living-room Bible study to a megachurch that draws about 7,600 visitors to seven campuses around Seattle each Sunday, and his books, blogs and podcasts have made him one of the most admired — and reviled — figures among evangelicals nationwide. Conservatives call Driscoll “the cussing pastor” and wish that he’d trade in his fashionably distressed jeans and taste for indie rock for a suit and tie and placid choral arrangements. Liberals wince at his hellfire theology and insistence that women submit to their husbands. But what is new about Driscoll is that he has resurrected a particular strain of fire and brimstone, one that most Americans assume died out with the Puritans: Calvinism, a theology that makes Pat Robertson seem warm and fuzzy.

At a time when the once-vaunted unity of the religious right has eroded and the mainstream media is proclaiming an “evangelical crackup,” Driscoll represents a movement to revamp the style and substance of evangelicalism. With his taste for vintage baseball caps and omnipresence on Facebook and iTunes, Driscoll, who is 38, is on the cutting edge of American pop culture. Yet his message seems radically unfashionable, even un-American: you are not captain of your soul or master of your fate but a depraved worm whose hard work and good deeds will get you nowhere, because God marked you for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time. Yet a significant number of young people in Seattle — and nationwide — say this is exactly what they want to hear. Calvinism has somehow become cool, and just as startling, this generally bookish creed has fused with a macho ethos. At Mars Hill, members say their favorite movie isn’t “Amazing Grace” or “The Chronicles of Narnia” — it’s “Fight Club.”

Mars Hill Church is the furthest thing from a Puritan meetinghouse. This is Seattle, and Mars Hill epitomizes the city that spawned it. Headquartered in a converted marine supply store, the church is a boxy gray building near the diesel-infused din of the Ballard Bridge. In the lobby one Sunday not long ago, college kids in jeans — some sporting nose rings or kitchen-sink dye jobs — lounged on ottomansand thumbed text messages to their friends. The front desk, black and slick, looked as if it ought to offer lattes rather than Bibles and membership pamphlets. Buzz-cut and tattooed security guards mumbled into their headpieces and directed the crowd toward the auditorium, where the worship band was warming up for an hour of hymns with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”

On that Sunday, Driscoll preached for an hour and 10 minutes — nearly three times longer than most pastors. As hip as he looks, his message brooks no compromise with Seattle’s permissive culture. New members can keep their taste in music, their retro T-shirts and their intimidating facial hair, but they had better abandon their feminism, premarital sex and any “modern” interpretations of the Bible. Driscoll is adamantly not the “weepy worship dude” he associates with liberal and mainstream evangelical churches, “singing prom songs to a Jesus who is presented as a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of time putting product in his long hair.”

Everything about this speaks of a man keenly focused on a particular ministry. As someone who grew up in the evangelical tradition (and before you ask, no I don’t subscribe to it any more, for a variety of reasons–if you wanna know more, buy me a brewski) with a father who had a ministry, I can tell you that ministries are niches. For example, my father’s focus was ministering to prisoners, particularly those who had committed the most unspeakable crimes and were locked up for life. Speaking in market terms, this is a set of captive customers (no pun intended) with lots of time to absorb your message.

And no, I’m not being sacriligeous or disrespectful here. The Evangelical Christian marketplace is crowded with competing churches and doctrines. In order to survive, a ministry has to focus on an audience. Same thing goes with your business. You have customers (congregants). They have choices of where to go (church) and what to believe (doctrine). You have to compete for their attention and money. The best way to do that is to offer them something that they believe in, and an effective way to do that is to be different.

Read the whole story here.

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Yes, I’m a bit inspired by Paul’s post over at uberaffiliate.com, but I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about life, work, the whole schmear. So here we go, some personal thoughts on 2008. To make it abundantly clear, yes 2008 sucked the big one, but a lot of what happened to me personally was all my fault. If I get to take credit for the good years, I have to own the bad years too:

• Not making a decision is the worst decision you can make. Period. End of story. If you stand still trying to figure something out, you’re gonna get creamed. I had that happen on a few projects this past year, and in general, getting creamed sucks. I don’t suggest it as a past time.
• Don’t listen to the people who say it can’t be done. I’m usually the guy who is too busy doing things to listen to the naysayers. This year, I let myself get undisciplined, and for that, I’m pretty pissed at myself. Eight years ago, everyone told me that starting a consulting practice was sheer madness (madness I tell you!) but I did it anyway. Now I’m going to be launching a few side projects (more on this later) and I’m hearing some of the same naysayers. Time to shut off the noise.
• There’s a difference between being a consultant and being a business owner. A business eventually makes money independent of your efforts. You go on vacation, you sleep, you have a life, and it continues to make money. It continues to nurture your life, making it all possible. Consultants don’t get any of that. They just work. And work. And work. If they stop working, for any reason (like a much-needed two week trip to Ohio to visit family) then the money stops.
• Being smart is not as good as being decisive. Smart people over think things. They agonize. They weigh all the alternatives, until weighing alternatives is all that you do. Just strap it on and go! For crying out loud. Why did I forget that?
• Most people aren’t aggressively stupid or malicious, just super busy and super focused on whatever little thing they’re chasing. Unfortunately for you, it’s really hard to tell the difference between a selfish destructive person and someone who is just super busy. My advice? Build your life and business without relying 100% on others. Relying on others is a sure way to make things unbearable–if you rely too much on others, you will always get burned. Doesn’t matter if your success hinges on the dry cleaner not destroying your best suit or your sister-in-law picking up the kids so you can finish writing your ebook.
• Take time out for friends and family. They love you. They want you to succeed. Some of you are lucky enough to have a wife as beautiful, supportive, and smart as my wife Hope is. Don’t push these people away. Be humble enough to accept that hug, that coffee outing, that lending ear. Then thank them for the refreshing pit stop. Then get back in the game.
• I don’t have time for the blues. I’m done running. I’m done feeling like a kicked dog. I’m gonna storm the castle, take some names, kick some ass, split some wigs, and in general, get jiggy all up in there.
• The Blues, on the other hand, is the highest art form known to man.

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Many of you who know me know that I’ve been trying to follow the precepts of GTD (getting things done) and in particular, this idea that you can get to Inbox Zero. Inbox Zero is Merlin Mann’s approach to email management that involves a certain action-based zeal–get that sucker down to ZERO items.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you have to wade through every single piece of email, but it does mean that every single email gets the quick and dirty GTD algorithm applied to it. Does it take less than two minutes to do it? Then do it. Can I delegate it instead? Can I delete it? Can I postpone it? Can I stick it away in some kind of reference folder for future use?

Following these little rules, you can pound through a lot of data pretty quickly, because like most of you, 80% of what’s in my inbox tends to be (a) trivial notes back and forth with people, (b) spam, and (c) status updates on projects or other project-related requests.

When I get a project request, I stick it in a Stickies note file that I keep open on my spare monitor, assigning it a priority (HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW). If it’s a request to do something on a specific day, I put it in iCal and tag it with the right category (personal errand, send an email, teleconference, go to a meeting, etc). If its just a piece of information for my amusement, edification, or what have you, I send a quick response (if needed) and file it away somewhere (if needed). You get the idea.

Inbox Zero doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly taskless, sitting here like some dot-com rat awaiting more little email pellets. It just means that I’ve processed everything in my little universe into the right places–my calendar, my task list, or into some reference folder.

Since switching to the Mac a year ago, I’ve found that all things GTD have been easier to implement. Not only is there the Apple zen aesthetic in effect, but the tools are just so much more powerful. For example, the simple little search application on Mail.app makes it really easy to find emails wherever they may be tucked. I’ve started adding little tags to my outbound emails to make my sent emails a little less messy too.

Anyway, tonight at 9:03 pm central, after a year of steady work, I achieved Inbox Zero. In other words, every single email had been processed in one way or another, leaving a blank inbox.It probably won’t last. Here’s a picture that will last, though.

Take that, Demons of Email Inbox Disarray!

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“You know, if traditional marketing were as effective as everyone thinks,” I told the five complete strangers within earshot, “I would give up my iPhone for a cute little top right about now.”

All of us chuckled. We’d been in line for an iPhone at the Domain’s Apple Store for well over an hour. Our place in line started at Martin + Osa but quickly moved to Victoria’s Secret, where we’d stalled for most of that time. We’d been chatting about 8GB versus 16GB, was it really worth getting GPS when the cell tower triangulation was pretty good, et cetera et cetera.

Between geekly ruminations, we’d been assaulted with visions of mannequins wearing scanty unmentionables in a vast array of garish colors. What a waste, I thought. A lot of these stores in the Domain could have capitalized big time. There were folks stuck in that line (as Hope and I were) for six or seven hours. They could have really put on a show. I mean, not that there was room for a catwalk for Victoria’s Secret models, but they could have been….nice to us. Geeks have significant others too, you know!

Okay, maybe they could have just propped the doors open so we’d get some air conditioning!

Back to planet Earth. I mean, think about it: California Pizza Kitchen could have sent someone around with pizza slice samples, then taken orders. Starbucks could have sent out a barista (they did, in all fairness, keep sending out jugs of water to replenish our sun-baked bodies). The little ice cream parlor would have made a killing in the gelato trade that sunny day. The possibilities were endless.

By all estimations, this one Apple Store sold 2000 or so iPhones, most of them of the 16GB variety (about $300 a pop), so they probably hauled in $500,000. They probably also sold a boatload of other stuff too–I saw folks walking out with MobileMe CDs and other Mac products, especially iPhone covers (to protect the new investment). So they easily cleared a million smackeroos on Friday.

Eventually (around 8pm) we made it inside the store. Hope and I kept standing in line for each other. Mostly it was me doing those crazy life things, like going home to take the dogs out, getting pizza, and so on. At the end of the day, our backs and legs didn’t give out, and shortly before 11pm, Hope had a shiny new iPhone 3G.

Me? I didn’t get one. I’ll wait a few weeks. I did however upgrade my iPhone to the 2.0 software, downloaded the SDK, and attended my first iPhone Developers meeting the very next day, and we planned out the preliminary agenda for an iPhone Developers Camp here in Austin for August….so my iPhone geek credentials are still intact.

P.S. For those of you who don’t know the meaning of love, yes, standing in line for six hours (off an on) so that the woman you love can get an iPhone…that’s love.

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